Simple math humor
Saturday I posted about a joke I did in a college math class. That math class did witness a great joke, but not by me, and it may only make sense to people who have done advanced math.
The professor was going to prove that a certain group, which is a precise mathematical concept, had a certain property. The group is the set of symmetries of an icosahedron. The property was that its only subgroups were itself and the identity. A group with that property is called “simple.” That group has a name, “I,” from the first letter of icosahedron.
The professor explained what he was going to do, walked to the board, and, as he said “I’m going to prove that I is simple,” he wrote “I is simple.”
One of the students, called out, as if correcting him, “I am simple.”
I won’t explain the joke for those who don’t get it, but for the math class, it hit on many levels. I mean many, many levels. The professor turned to correct the student, then realized the joke, as did the rest of the class, followed by seeing multiple levels of meaning, language, patterns, and so on. Even the student who said it took a while to get all the levels.
Everyone laughed for a while. Sorry if you don’t get it, but if you do, you’re welcome. You might like my Godel Escher Bach posts about the map on the schoolyard across the street from me.
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